SCALE, n. 1. The ratio of a man to the sky behind him. Typically expressed as 1:∞, though this figure is considered approximate. 2. The distance, in geological strata, between a laptop screen and a slave ship. Measured in impasto. Measured in centuries. Not measurable. 3. What the stars are doing when no one is watching: their cold autumn work, indifferent as a verb. 4. (archaic) The underside of a thing that holds light. See also: table edge, the face of someone before dawn, the city's amber smudge where history leaks under the horizon and keeps burning. 5. A nested problem. The intimate inside the cosmological inside the geological inside the dark. Solve for the man.